Acosmic bash

Rating: Null/10 (11 October 2013)

This has a bit more personality and atmosphere than Bay's corporate burger joint next door, but in the kitchen it prepares basically the same greasy food. Taking a vague look, from afar, it repeats all the same clichés: hope is lost, regained, a rousing speech wires us for a last fight, scientists come up with a last-minute solution, then the noble sacrifice, the false death.
However, if you can ignore the smell coming from the kitchen, you may appreciate a few nice things on the walls.
There is a definitive style at work: colors, lights, movements. Some nice translucent environments. We also have a subjective eye in the fights, ordinary at this point but done well. Half the gamble here is to create visual comprehension: in order to visually grasp the fights we need to be placed, need something that creates human scale. It's why in the first fight there is the fishing boat, so that looking up from the deck we can acquire apparent size and distance.
The other half is gravity in the eye. We have it here, some breathtaking occasions. Del Toro employed people who really understand their physics, how things ought to move and impact so that we inherit the blow. My favorite bits are during the flight to space, inside the cockpit the camera moves up as the fall begins as if our eye has actual gravity. That someone thought this the appropriate motion and not just any wobbling I think matters.
So when all these things work in concert, in the best spots it achieves an operatic feel.
But we still have a gravity of perception geared to simple physics. This is where the poor story reappears in another light. We do indeed need human scale in more ways than one: a human relationship as our anchor so that looking up from it we'll grasp a scale of meaning that creates emotional metaphysics, projecting a sense of world round the physical moment. (great filmmakers, like Malick, can bring more of that inner sense in the visual flow)
Here they had a promising idea of this sort. In order to pilot the robots, two pilots are required in neural connection to each other, merging to one mind. They call the effect 'drifting', which is similar to terms I use to describe the same thing. The plot function is that a scientist 'drifts' with a monster brain, 'seeing' what they're planning to do which helps to save the day. Okay.
Deeper, the metaphor stands for love at its purest, for shared drifting between souls as the world is torn. Bringing to the drift no memory or self, not holding onto anything, flowing in the river and you are neither the river nor separate as the Chinese muse. Beautiful and apt metaphor. Someone here obviously knows about meditation, which is exactly this drifting in the present moment, skiing on mind.
Doesn't work when you also have to worry about giant toys. It's like wanting to understand quantum sense by looking at tectonic plates, different dynamics.
I think the broader mistake here was that they assumed we'd need to know as much as possible about the film's world otherwise we'd be lost. So we have a bunch of stuff thrown together in the prologue and then nothing is expanded, we just segue from one fight to the next. They didn't let us 'drift' with the narrative, discovering as we go. It has no world as a result.
(I think this is also why it didn't do well in the US, but did abroad. American audiences are being rewired to expect an ongoing world to inhabit for a few years, we all are but Americans are in the front of it —Nolan's Batman, the Marvel universe, Twilight, Potter and the recent crop of quality TV exemplify this in the most simple way. There may be nothing else noteworthy about this trend beyond setting up a viewing habit that I expect intelligent filmmakers to make much of. In Russia and China they are 20 years behind in cinematic terms, the sheer bulk of the thing still seems to work. Just a very rough guess.)